2000 papers at viXra.org

Today is the turn of viXra.org to pass an important milestone with over 2000 papers now in the e-print archive. The total has been added since it started a little less than two years ago. When I started on this project I did not imagine that so many people would make use of the service, so I would like to take this opportunity to thank the 600 authors who have supported us by submitting their work. This is also a good moment to thank Huping Hu and Jonathan Dickau who have kindly provided mirror servers for the site and they have helped out with submission administration to keep the service running at times when I am away. Their backup and support gives me confidence to say that viXra.org will survive as a long-term repository. I am also very grateful to those who have made generous donations to help cover the costs of running the server.

Despite the unqualified success of viXra.org I still get a sense that there are a lot more people out there who could benefit from using viXra. Some of them simply don’t know about it so this blog is one thing I do to publicize its existence. viXra.org is primarily here for scientists who do not have access to a qualified endorser for arXiv.org, usually because they are non-professionals working independently of any academic institution. Many of them have left professional research to follow a different carear but retain an interest and continue their research in their spare time. Of course viXra welcomes submissions from anyone and we do even get some contributions from people with .edu adresses along with the occassional highschool student and unqualified amateurs who like to think for themselves. To encourage more of these people to join in, here are a couple of answers to some of the questions people ask.

Does submission to viXra.org give you as much exposure as other archives such as arXiv.org?

It would be a plain lie to say that viXra is as well known or as well browsed as arXiv, yet the stats indicate that papers on viXra get just as many hits as they do on arXiv. Let’s look at the numbers. According to the arXiv usage stats they typically get something like 800,000 web connections each day. From the logs of viXra.org our corresponding figure is around 4000 per day, just 0.5 percent of the arXiv number. But of course we have a lot less papers. ArXiv have reached about 6000 new papers per month while viXra receives just 80 per month, or about 1.3% of their numbers, so relative to new papers submitted arXiv is getting about 2.5 times as many hits as viXra. Then again, arXiv has been around a lot longer and many accesses come from searches on its back-catalog. arXiv has 680,000 papers compared to viXra’s total of 2000 which is just 0.3% . So relative to the total archive we actually get 60% more hits than they do. Real usage is a mixture of looking at old and new papers so within the uncertainties of this crude analysis I think it is fair to say that a paper submitted to viXra gets a similar number of hits as one on arXiv.

How can this be? In fact most hits do not come from people browsing new submissions. They come from people who search on Google and other serach engines for keywords of interest to them. Since viXra is just as well indexed on Google as arXiv is, it actually gets just as many hits per paper.

Will submission to viXra.org damage your credibility because it is full of “crackpots” who cannot make it into arXiv.org?

It is really important to understand that it is not the purpose of an e-print archive to give you or your work credibility. Such recognition comes only from other sources such as acceptance in a peer-reviewed journal, use or citations of your work, or emperical verification of any predictions and the occasional Nobel Prize. All that you get from an archive such as viXra.org or arXiv.org is a longterm repository and a fixed link to your work so that people can find it and make links to it that will stay in place. It also provides independently verified timestamps so that others can check who reported any idea first in questions of priority.

Other scientists find papers in an archive mostly by searching on Google or by being referred from somewhere else. Once they find it they are not bothered about where it is. If they are sufficiently interested in the subject to have come across it they will be qualified to judge it on its own merits.

As to the accusation that vixra.org is full of crank papers, I would be a fool to claim that the work of non-professionals who do not have access to arXiv.org is going to be of the same qualify as the work of professionals who do, at least on average. But there are plenty of people who know their subject and have interesting work to publish who nevertheless do not have access to a qualified endorser as required by arXiv. Conversely, access to such an endorser does not mean someone’s work is good either. There are good papers on viXra.org just as there are bad ones on arXiv.org.

On a lighter note, enjoy this video, (warning: bad words!)

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65 Responses to 2000 papers at viXra.org

It is unfortunate that there is a widespread prejudice nowadays that viXra is a repository for crackpots and failed ideas while arXiv is reserved by default for high-quality science. Maybe things will change in the future but a shift in the general attitude towards viXra will not happen overnight.

My general impression is that most scientists who know about it do appreciate what viXra is about and are happy that it is there, but I don’t expect them to go around singing its praises.

There are other people who sometimes post negative or sarcastic comments on blogs and forums. If I find them in time I try to respond and put the record straight. What I find is
(1) They are usually writing anonymously
(2) They are not themselves active scientists
(3) They do not back down when corrected, they just go quiet or repeat the same nonsense

The result of all this is that if you search for information about viXra and don’t look at the details you can get a negative impression. I continue to try to educate, but in the end, if people don’t want to use the service we provide, then that is their choice. At least they can’t say the option isn’t available.

Dear Phil, congratulations. Let me also add my praise – that’s quite a collection. You could publish it in a series of historical books, “One half of the global crackpots’ production of the early 21st century”.

If you count how many hours have been removed from those authors’ annoying correspondence with the sane people – which was used for their writing of viXra preprints – so that the sane people didn’t have to deal with this stuff directly, your contribution to science has clearly been huge.

Would you claim that there is a paper in the collection which shouldn’t be classified as a typical crackpot paper? Which one is it?

As you know, I would not classify anything as crackpot. It is not my way of seeing things. At the other end of the spectrum, you are well known for classifying a very wide range of people as crackpots, including anyone who proposes an alternative to string theory and anyone who thinks we might be warming the Earth with pollution.

Given your broad use of the word nobody will take it as a strong statement that you consider everything published in viXra as crackpot.

Dear Phil, please don’t take it negatively. I may use any positive language if you prefer it but my question still remains:

Among the revolutionary and robust contributions to the human knowledge, which of the viXra papers is the most remarkable one that you’re really proud to have brought to the light of the eternity? ;-)

You know, I am actually asking about a single URL of a preprint that you wouldn’t be ashamed of to show to someone who would like to go beyond the politically correct clichés about the remarkable opportunity for great people to reveal their thoughts that the otherwise evil world would keep unpublished.

I would love to be able to point to one great paper and say that this proves it is all worthwhile, but that is not how it works. Here are some reasons
– I don’t read all the papers. There is a diverse range of papers and only a limited number are in my area of expertise and interest.
– Of the ones I look at and fully understand, all have some elements that I tend to disagree with. There may be other things I like about them but I am not going to hold them up as examples if I can’t defend them completely
– The exceptions would of course be my own papers which I am happy to defend, but I already know you don’t agree with any of them
– I think it will take many years before the value of some of the papers here can be judged. The physics papers in particular can be very speculative and we will only know if there is anything right about them when the foundations of physics have advanced a few decades.

In my personal experience, most scientists hate vixra for its ‘crackpotism’, without having any real understanding of its function. But then this reaction characterises most of my interactions with scientists, so that may not be indicative of their opinion of vixra, per se. Keep up the good work!

We cannot get over the fact that for some of us science is a weapon and instrument of power. But there are also those for whom science is genuine exploration of the unknown. In the opportunistic and corrupted world of Big Science viXra is the communication channel for them.

@Lubos Phil is a competent scientist who knows perfectly well that on average viXra.blog is to arXiv.org what sunday amateur league football is to world cup football. It provides a social service for people to become a scientist on a certain level and for that reason, Phil should be applauded. The same goes for you. You’re not a climatologist yet you publish your views in this area which strictly speaking come under the banner of being crackpotish since this isn’t your field. But even so, they’re interesting to read, and you also publish lots of great stuff on physics that will inspire the next generation of physicists.

You’re both cultural architects whose presence on the net is generally uplifting and your noble motives no doubt are why motls.blogspot.com and viXra.org exist in the first place.

@Ervin I’m saying that viXra cannot be considered as reliable a source of scentific progress compared to arXiv, on average. Just look at the scientific credentials of some of the people that post there without even a degree in physics, never mind a PhD from a world-class university, yet here they are creating a theory of everything. At the very least, it’s a gold mine of information for a social scientist to work on in helping to explain this social phenomenon.

“Some” may not be well qualified but many of the authors who submit to viXra do have PhDs. Some people without PhDs can also make useful contributions to science. Yes the “average” standard is lower, but averages are not very significant here.

In any case I don’t think there is any sense in criticizing someones contribution on the basis of their qualifications. Criticism should be based on the validity of what they say.

On average, I agree, it’s not a fair comparison. But often times true advances in science are the result of creative individuals who refuse to blindly follow the norm and produce suprising insights and connections. At the end of the day, when it comes to uncharted territory, open minded research from scientists working in relative isolation might be more beneficial than group-thinking, as it is often practiced in traditional academic settings. Also, holding a PhD from a reputable school is not an automatic guarantee for a succesful career in science.

This is why I believe viXra is a valuable source of new ideas: simply because is open and unconstrained.

Academic physics could be forgiven for being so hard-nosed if it had its house in order. The relevant question is: through what channel is the breakthrough, the new mode of thinking, most likely to appear? Through arXiv or through viXra? My bet is for viXra.

@Philip Carter you say “My bet is for viXra”. No competent physicist would seriously put a bet on viXra anymore than putting a bet on some American community college compared to Harvard. My bet is that you don’t even have a degree in physics to make a bet like that, but I could be wrong ;)

Lubos asks for “… a preprint that you wouldn’t be ashamed of … that the otherwise evil world would keep unpublished …”.

I cannot speak for Phil, but I can submit my preprint at vixra 1106.0042 as an example that:
1 – is not on the Cornell arXiv because I have been blacklisted
and
2 – makes specific predictions of 3 mass states for the Higgs that will very likely be either refuted or confirmed by LHC by the end of 2012 or earlier.
The 1/fb that LHC now has should allow refutation at 95 per cent CL,
and the 5/fb that LHC should have by the end of 2012 should allow 5 sigma discovery of the low and mid mass states and 4 sigma evidence for the high mass state.

If my predictions are refuted, then my 3-state model is wrong and I have wasted many years of work on it, and Lubos can feel happy that his ad hominem characterisations of me are supported.

If my predictions are confirmed, then my work is validated.

I am not ashamed of the fact that this is an example with no room for fudge factors such as moving parameters beyond observability. I am either right or wrong about the 3-state Higgs, and the LHC will soon tell me which, and I will have to live with the result.

Just a correction: even if your result is wrong, the collateral effects of your work, namely collecting towards the internet a huge collection of otherwise scattered results on particle theory, group theory and algebra, for sure has already been influential.

Paul Ginsparg created arXiv in 1991 it was in 1994 that arXiv took off from the ground….arXiv have 18 years of advantage…but i am conviced that viXra will surpass arXiv….in less than 18 years…..because if a scientist is about to write a paper that is a bold new move he(or she) perhaps would be afraid to send it to arXiv where the paper have a possibility to be blocked out…so like Dr Gibbs says in science there must exists freedom to speech

i already mentioned this before but for those who are reading viXra Blog for the first time remember Einstein as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office of Berna without an academic affiliation working Relativity in his leisure times

transplanting both viXra and arXiv to the year of 1905

where the Einstein papers would appear…???? y

the papers of Einstein would appear on viXra

i guess a moderator back in 1905 reading about time dilatation and twin paradox from an author that dont have academic affiliation…he propably would guess Einstein was wrong

Fernando, despite what you guess, the facts are otherwise. Einstein had no trouble getting his work published, and it was not relegated to some obscure place but appeared in Annalen der Physik. The importance was quickly recognized. In general I think that people with unusual ideas to offer have a legitimate place in Physics, but my belief in that principle wanes upon hearing comparisons with Einstein.

Exactly, Bill. Einstein just sent his paper to “Annalen der Physik”. It had a competent editor whose name happened to be Max Planck who just properly read the paper – at that time, it was possible to read them in their entirety, I guess. He evaluated it according to the content and published it.

Today, Einstein would get an endorsement from any contact he had, he would send it to arXiv, and Paul Ginsparg would happily publish it on hep-th just like Max Planck did. Einstein would probably not be looking for an “alternative” website, why should he? Sorry but only losers have to do so. There is no censorship in high-energy physics. There may be lots of hype about silly things and silence about valuable things but there’s no censorship and if there are filters, they are based on quality.

I think that the very reason of viXra’s existence is to reject the obviously valid previous sentence which is a sufficient reason for viXra to be useless as a source of science.

And of course there is you Lubos, who while still an undergraduate famously posted a paper on Arxiv: “Proposals on nonperturbative superstring interactions”. Your talent was recognised by the string community and the rest is history. Even then, it still required someone to endorse your paper so you could post it and so for the talented, there aren’t too many obstacles.

Did you come across any major obstacles in getting your paper taken seriously? I doubt it.

And if someone totally unknown “dorkhead” today is trying to get a “theory of everything” based on only three dimensions, proving that both General relativity and string are fundamentally wrong, but at the same time predicts exactly what we observe all over across the universe, based on exact correct calculus, then he would of course get his paper both in arxiv and Nature !

He would of course be rejected everywhere

Only when a respected professor long after happens to write the same equations it would have been accepted in arxiv and everywhere. And the dorkhead would only be mentioned in the historybooks hundred years later.

An endorser was not needed when Lubos submitted those papers. I could also submit easily at that time. Later when the endorsement system was introduced I could no longer submit papers so I started viXra. Now I have an endorser but I recognize that there are others who still need viXra as I did before.

Dear Philip, please, don’t spread these rather hardcore conspiracy theories. You know very well that if your papers made sense, you would easily find an endorser.

For example, if you find something that actually makes sense about the quantum-bit / SUGRA black hole entropy formulae business, Michael Duff would be more than willing to endorse you because those things are fun (which is not necessarily true for the noise that can be written about these things). If you write papers about other topics, I could easily recommend other endorsers to you, too.

So as you admit, it’s not about you. But the same thing holds for others as well. If you knew that one of the 2,000 submissions to viXra actually makes sense, you would easily get in touch with someone who would endorse the particular viXra author to become an arXiv author, especially because there are many pretty crazy and “open-minded” people who have the status of an endorser, too.

In particular, Lee Smolin won’t hesitate to endorse every “alternative” revolutionary paper of Garrett Lisi’s type (and worse). And it’s not just people of Smolin’s type. Even real physicists could give them this endorsement. It’s my understanding of our discussions that the bad boy of physics Lenny Susskind would give an endorsement to Lisi, too. ;-) It’s de facto his image now. That’s how he guarantees that he doesn’t get older: he’s carefully mixing his aging process with getting childish and supporting ever more infantile statements by younger physicists and not-so-physicists, so Lenny is still effectively 30-years-old or so. :-)

So this is not about any censorship. It’s a standard quality filter which is totally *essential* in science, rather than hurtful for science. Science is all about the elimination of the ideas that don’t work and sorry to say but ideas that can’t find an endorser for the arXiv belong to this class.

Carla, thanks for your interest: I actually submitted a zeta-regularization paper already in 1995 without any problems. It’s a piece of fun heuristic work making it clear that one shouldn’t be afraid to use the zeta-regularization method (“generalized sums of integers”) even in more complex cases and it works – but I wouldn’t claim it’s a great paper and it took more than a decade for it to earn the first non-my citation haha.

When I submitted the E8 orientifold matrix model paper, Tom Banks got famously enthusiastic and said many clearly exaggerated things about the guy from a patent office – my papers were really “supplements” to Matrix theory only. But it’s also the case that I received an excited e-mail from Witten in the following morning after the E8 orientifold preprint appeared, too. Dear [undergrad] Prof Motl, I want to mention we were all impressed by the paper and curious which institution you’re affiliated with because there’s no affiliation mentioned in the paper. … Those things got more intense with the matrix strings – even though Witten in particular didn’t understand this one immediately! ;-) But of course he did understand it a month or two later, too. I could tell you details who understood things quickly and who didn’t. But I assure you that this variable speed of understanding is not so uncommon for “normally affiliated” well-known people, either.

I have never experienced any “disbelief” just because I would be an undergrad from the post-socialist Europe. It is just a silly conspiracy theory that this is how HEP physics works. HEP-TH research is led by competent people who would surely love to make original contributions and who mostly judge papers according to the content – at least those physicists who matter are doing it. So if there were some hope of a big insight in an outsider’s paper, be sure that a significant fraction of the HEP-TH community would do their best to study the paper (and possibly hijack it and get a part of the credit). I can enumerate you dozens of people who would act in this way – I would have always been in the list of course. This subset doesn’t have to be large – 5% is surely enough. If there is something about an outsider’s paper that actually leads to some progress in the understanding of anything, it will be quickly picked by those 5% and spread like fire as they add their contributions and as they make the presentation more absorbable by their colleagues. HEP-TH physicists are not reading viXra not because of some conspiracy or groupthink but simply because they evaluate the evidence and determine that it would almost certainly be a waste of time.

What I experienced, of course, was the hijacking of 50+% of the credit by my Dutch (and, in the less important cases, Korean) (ex-)colleagues. DVV arguably found matrix string theory independently 2 months after me, an interpretation that boils down to the people’s belief and I chose to believe this thing because believing in anything else would be really discouraging when it comes to the state of the integrity of folks. Of course that I was led to act as if I never cared about the achronological credit attribution but of course that I couldn’t completely “not care”. Still, I think it’s a paper that got an appropriate amount of attention. What I am just annoyed by is that people stopped working on those important things – Matrix theory is something that is really explicitly constructed and one may learn lots about it. Of course, it’s also more or less “fully understood” and can’t be easily extended to other backgrounds etc. Still, I have obviously considered the dropping interest in these extremely well-defined mathematical frameworks – especially once they began to be replaced by the time-dependent and cosmological (and later anthropic) speculations – to be a clear path to deterioration and the subsequent developments have proven my expectations beyond any doubt, I think.

Let me just stress that I am not saying that every HEP-TH physicist is willing and capable to gain an objective and fully independent opinion about a new paper by an unspecified person. Those who can may even be a minority – a minority that becomes even smaller if one takes the different specializations of the folks into account.

But what I am saying is that the community is doing science so it still ultimately tends to converge to the better understanding. After some noise, things get crystallized and settled. The people who can discover things – and present things more clearly – and who are really independently able to think about other people’s contribution and so forth just enjoy a higher level of credibility inside the community. So even if their in a minority, it just doesn’t matter. Science is not supposed to be done by majority.

Science is mostly done by a selected minority of the people who happen to be lucky or, more often, who happen to be smarter and more hard-working and more educated. The ultimate respect for the truth and for those who can get closer to it is enough for the community to work.

Of course, if you had a community that prefers preconceived dogmas over progress in our understanding, or even a community that is corrupt and existentially depends on producing insights with a particular “flavor”, or one that prefers groupthink and mediocre people who don’t try to differ over the brilliant ones, you will get a totally different set of reactions to outsider papers and totally different subsequent developments. But those negative descriptions don’t apply to high-energy physics, and they don’t apply to high-energy physics despite some dead ends that could have been tried in the recent decade.

Theoretical physics at this top level has traditionally been the “least group think afflicted” subgroup of the mankind and it remains the case. People are thinking in many different ways – when it comes to the focus on maths, heuristic arguments, experimental evidence etc. There is a whole natural spectrum. Each point on the spectrum has some justification. And of course, as the fields develops, some of the regions of the spectrum may get more important because their strategy is shown to lead to faster progress and it’s ultimately appreciated by people at other points, too – because they’re not completely blind.

So I think it’s great that Phil can make all the software that competes with the arXiv etc. and from this technical viewpoint, he is on par with the Ginsparg team etc. However, it’s just a habit to consider the arXiv – much like the paper journals in the past – to be the standard tool of communication between the people who really follow what’s happening in their field. For this reason, another preprint server that is *defined* by its being different from the standardized one cannot be anything else than the collection of the lowest-quality papers that would be posted on the first server if everything could be posted. It’s because this definition is equivalent to a complete disrespect for any quality criteria. And one can’t build good science in this way.

I can’t rigorously prove that no revolutionary paper could be posted to viXra – because it’s not true. The future discoverer of the theory of everything could deliberately do so to make things funny. It’s just unlikely and requires some “intelligent design”. In the modern interconnected world, the communication between the people is high enough so that anyone who has a chance to discover something important can also think about a way how to get an endorsement for the arXiv – perhaps an indirect one.

Well, I think that in some sense, it *is* questionable whether Einstein’s papers could really be *peer*-reviewed. They could be reviewed by a scientist who is working on the same discipline as Einstein – but a *peer*? ;-) Sheldon Cooper made the same comments on TBBT.

More seriously, Max Planck was a peer – and that’s also why he immediately understood relativity, five years after he give birth to the quantum theory.

Except, of course, Einstein papers were *not* peer-reviewed. From the link about myths of peer-review:

“How many of Einstein’s 300 plus papers were peer reviewed? According to the physicist and historian of science Daniel Kennefick, it may well be that only a single paper of Einstein’s was ever subject to peer review.”

“This is strikingly reminiscent of perhaps the most celebrated editorial judgments of all, in Annalen der Physik in1905. That was the year in which Einstein published five extraordinary papers in that journal, including special relativity and the photoelectric effect. The journal had a great editor in Max Planck. He recognized the virtue of publishing such outlandish ideas, but there was also a policy that allowed authors much latitude after their first publication. Indeed, in journals in those days, the burden of proof was generally on the opponents rather than the proponents of new ideas.”

1) They posted to both servers, usually because they managed to send to the arXiv by a happy (or unlucky, depending on your viewpoint) coincidence that couldn’t be systematically repeated, right? ;-)

2) It’s a loaded statement to say that they’re not a “peer-reviewed” journal. The arXiv started and has been for a long time an electronic journal equivalent that was reviewed by Paul Ginsparg who was surely a peer at least until he started to do this hard job, and in some sense, he’s still a peer. So it’s a peer-reviewed source in this sense.

That the peer is just one person is a technical detail that didn’t cause any problems in practice. People just knew that Ginsparg wouldn’t do “strikingly wrong” decisions. Obviously, the server was meant to be inclusive for the community, and everyone would make almost the same selections about this “inclusive ensemble” of preprints – only self-evident rubbish would be rejected. For years, the group of potential contributors was also pretty well-defined by institutions. It’s an advanced field where people outside these institutions really haven’t mastered the discipline.

Whatever decisions he made, the resulting composition of the arXiv was still very useful for actual researchers which is what really matters for them. So there was always a quality filter (sometimes “streamlined” by looking at the affiliations) – something that could fail to be the case in the viXra case. Whether the quality filter obeys some particular “common” procedures is totally secondary. It doesn’t have to be so. The actual purpose is not to blindly follow some procedures; the ultimate goal is to help to improve the quality of the papers that appear at the given place – so that they’re useful for the readers – and a peer review procedure is just a tool to achieve it, not a goal by itself!

3) This is a totally irrelevant, vacuous statement. Endorsers are human beings with biases but so are the readers of preprints, readers of journals, readers of web pages, commenters on Phil Gibbs’ blog, and generic users of the Google search engine, too. So any “science contributor” is ultimately a subject whose fate depends on human decisions, anyway. A key difference is just that the endorsers know much more about physics so their “biases” – which are usually called “knowledge”, not “biases” – are more likely to select valuable stuff out of the jungle that you would otherwise get.

What you clearly don’t understand is that Ginsparg, peer review, or other methods are just doing a service (a totally positive and important thing!) for the actual researchers who want to know what’s going on in their field – and they use the services of these people and methods because these people and methods have worked for them. Despite the similarities, Phil is *not* doing this essential service for the reader which is why viXra ends up being a high-entropy dumping ground of verbal garbage with almost no value for a reader who actually knows something. It is totally logical and totally inevitable. Quality filters are paramount, especially in the era when gigabytes of complete garbage are being produced every day.

Phil is surely not offended because he knows that I have made this conclusio, why I have made this conclusion, and he also knows that every other reader of the hep-th archive at arxiv.org made a very similar one, too. With a finite number of exceptions none of which is known to me.

I didn’t write my long comment just for you to look for ways how to create a dense atmosphere and encourage others to get offended. I was writing this long text because I have noticed that that you – and not only you – fail to understand the basic logic of selection of the truth that is so essential for the scientific method and I thought that you would benefit out of my explanations of these elementary things. My hopes may have been unjustified.

Let me summarize a point in another way. There is a wide perception between the people like you – and the contributors to viXra, to put it mildly – that the method of propagation of the truth in science is about the finding of a machinery that will take some people’s insights and will copy them and violently pump them into the brains of all others as efficiently as possible. And because you realize that you are less successful in pumping your stuff into the scientists’ brains than e.g. Edward Witten, you have to change something about the methods how the pumping should be done.

This is a “supplier’s viewpoint” – more precisely, the perspective of a producer who doesn’t care what the consumers think. But the key point is that the selection of valid and invalid things is ultimately not being done by the suppliers. It’s done by everyone, mainly by the “consumers”. The readers are ultimately choosing what they want to read and what they find valuable or helpful. So whatever methods you will make to store and copy lousy preprints on a server or outside a server or anything of the sort, competent readers will always find a method to find out that the material is rubbish and they will stop reading it, looking for better sources.

This has nothing to do with the electronic or non-electronic formats of the contributions, with screams of someone that he is giving the widest room for everyone, or with the domain name or journal name where contributions should be sent. If someone is just making up theories of everything, dreaming about his being a new Einstein, and considering the actual problems with the content of his preprints to be details that others must be made to overlook, he is fighting against the wind turbines because the people who matter will always find a way to see through the trick and escape from it.

In the real world, the market of ideas is obviously governed by people who are human, finite, and fallible, but science guarantees that some evaluation of the data is more correct than other evaluation of the data. A properly working scientist will know how to gradually select the right results from the jungle of right and mostly wrong results, and a properly working community always finds its way to select the correct insights, conclusions, as well as the people who are more likely to reach new discoveries and correct conclusions. A server that never makes any selection or “discrimination” of the contributions is not doing science. It is an assorted collection of stuff that pretty much inevitably has to be analogous to a dumping ground.

Now, I realize that Phil doesn’t have enough quality contributors that he could make a selection – he doesn’t have any, to be more accurate – and I wouldn’t be able to produce a server that would seriously compete with the arXiv, either (at least I think that I wouldn’t). But just because this task is hard shouldn’t be enough to claim that the goal has been achieved or that the selection has become unnecessary.

One comparable “pair of competitors” is Wikipedia and Conservapedia. You know, I am conservative but that doesn’t prevent me from seeing that Conservapedia is a pathetic parody of Wikipedia which is really shameful when it comes to the perceived intelligence of the conservatives and related issues.

Now, Wikipedia is biased in many respects. Also, I would claim that it is much less biased than some people think and that the bias is usually “easy to be separated” by intelligent readers because in most cases, it influences the tone (which is easy to change) and not the technical details about the content.

But if some people want to make an unbiased or oppositely biased version of Wikipedia, it doesn’t mean that one won’t be able to compare the quality of the two results. And the outcome clearly is that Conservapedia is just a pile of garbage. It has various reasons – it’s being edited by a much smaller number of people than Wikipedia and even their average intelligence may be much lower than the average weighted intelligence of the Wikipedia editors.

A moral of this story is that one can’t create intellectual values just by screaming that someone else is biased. The creation of intellectual values usually requires lots of work and/or creativity, knowledge, and talent. Those things can’t be faked and they can’t be replaced by conspiracy theories that the “other [mainstream] side” is participating in a big conspiracy. Even if it is, one must actually produce articles etc. that have some internal coherence and that makes sense and chances are that pure conspiracy theorists can’t do it.

Let me be very clear that I don’t have any interest whatsoever “to create a dense atmosphere and encourage others to get offended.” This blog is an open forum and people should be free to participate without fear of being reprimanded.

It would be fatal for the establishments of Science to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering heat of many truth-seeking men and women’s discontents will not pass until there is an invigorating atmosphere of freedom, equality and opportunity to be heard in Science. This is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that we needed to blow off steam and will soon be content will have a rude awakening if the establishments of Science return to their businesses as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in Science until all truth-seeking men and women are granted their rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will come to shake the establishments of Science until the bright day of freedom, equality and opportunity to be heard emerges.

Lubos, thanks for your long and comments. There is so much I can’t possibly address it all.

It is interesting to hear about your experiences from those times when you submitted your work on matrix string theory. You were at that time able to submit without an endorser and you attracted immediate interest from Banks and Witten. We will never know what would have happened if you had required an endorser. Perhaps someone at your university would have been able and willing to do it, or perhaps you could still have attracted the attention of Banks and Witten before putting your work on arXiv. It is worth noting that if you had been delayed by just two months in submitting to arXiv you could have lost your proof of priority.

Of course I am willing to acknowledge that it would have worked out OK in your case. Your work was connected directly to recent major advances and could clearly be seen as valuable by anyone involved in the field. However, not all work fits that profile. Sometimes it is less immediately obvious that a new idea is going to be of value. It is not so sure that an endorser would be available if it came from someone not yet in a research position, but it is important that the work should be made available without delay. It also needs to be done in a way that protects the authors priority,.i.e not on a personal web page or by sending it privately to other physicists.

When I first submitted papers to the arXiv in 1994 I too drew a response from some well known physicists. Susskind in particular sent me an email to ask more about it. He said that he was visiting ‘t Hooft to discuss the black hole information problem at the time and he thought it needed some radical ideas of this type to sort it out. I asked him what ‘t Hooft thought of my work and he replied “What does it matter what ‘t Hooft thinks? I liked it!” He never replied again :) This was before his Matrix Theory.

I think in my case it would have been very difficult for me to get an endorser at that time if it had been required. I doubt it would have attracted so much interest then if that had been the case. Only time will tell if my work has any impact. It is more speculative than yours and can only be loosely connected to other mainstream methods even now. I know you think it fails but I am happy that I have that certified record of my early work on arXiv for when someone finally reinvents the ideas.

I am glad that for anyone else in a similar position today they have viXra available for the same purpose. I can see that you are never going to agree that it is needed but it will stay there anyway.

In any case I see value in a wider range of work than you do. I think we need a melting pot of speculative ideas to solve the foundational problems. Even work that looks utterly wrong may contain a mathematical or philosophical idea that someone else can turn to use. You seem to prefer a more direct approach working in validated steps from what is known towards the final goal. I think there are other ways to get there.

By the way, I share your disappointment that matrix theory has not continued to develop. Do you have any ideas about how it might happen?

Dear Phil, thanks that you’re thinking about these matters. Your experience with Susskind and ‘t Hooft is kind of interesting.

People left Matrix theory, much like they left the BMN research of stringy physics in the AdS bulk later – and similarly hundreds of topics – because they couldn’t find (and even “we” couldn’t find) too many truly new things, and some people only try to find results that are “immediate” or sufficiently straightforward and those subdisciplines just ran out of them. In AdS/CFT, the flux of articles continues largely because AdS/CFT is much about the model building – constant mutations and modifications, trying to explain and address lots of partial things (either applications to QCD, superconductors, and all these things; or the advanced details of high-loop amplitudes) – and those things may be done for decades. They’re not necessarily deep or conceptually original, of course. Also, the survival rate of a research topic is clearly increased by its direct links to 4-dimensional theories that other “real world oriented physicists” study. I think that this huge bias is counterproductive but it’s surely there. That’s why AdS5/CFT4 is actually responsible for 99+ percent of papers of AdS/CFT – and why Matrix theory which doesn’t work (at least so far) in 4 dimensions was mostly left as a hot topic. For true conceptual progress, it’s very clear that the “d=4″ condition has nothing to do with the chances to make progress but people’s training – and even the idiotic Popperazzi propaganda that has affected not only the public perception of physics in recent years – has played an important role in distorting the focus of the fundamental physics research.

Moreover, the cosmological fad unfortunately kicked in in the wake of the 1998 observation of the cosmological constant. This was a surprise and people tried to find a simple qualitative way to match the small positive number and they have failed – with the doubtful exception of the anthropic principle – which was arguably predetermined to become the status of quo “ideology”, an inevitable sign of a lack of genuine progress. A very similar anthropic picture – although a less sophisticated, non-stringy one – could have become the status quo ideology in any other moment of the history of science if the progress in getting real new insights would slow down. I would always say that the C.C. was just one number that could be perhaps explained by a not-so-important one-line calculation in the future which would use currently unknown concepts and it was wrong to rebuild the whole field – which can and should deal with millions of other numbers and their relationships – but the research mostly went in a different direction. People got obsessed by this single number and they were ready to sacrifice all of their other topics (and knowledge).

If I needed an endorsement in 1996, I would probably talk to my QFT teacher or GR teacher or anyone at the Charles University in Prague where I studied – some of whom would be able to give endorsement. If they rejected, I would probably contact an author of papers on similar topics by e-mail. It would be an inconvenience – I agree that it was kind of pleasant that well-defined computer criteria and formatting were the only things an “outsider” had to wrestle with. But these other, more human obstacles are not infinite. If I lost and needed an endorsement today, I would contact one of the great physicists I am in occasional contact with, and I know that if they didn’t find it appropriate to endorse such a paper, they would almost certainly have a good reason. Now, I can assure you that there are lots of people who would love to refuse to endorse me for political-slash-personal reasons. But they’re not needed. Again, this is not about majority votes. It’s about a single endorsement. By the way, it’s even more plausible that if I discovered something important, I would still try to change it to a paper co-authored with an expert in that field so that she or he would improve it, add things of some sort, fixed some mistakes (assuming that the core idea is right) or at least add their name on the title page and therefore visibility. I have co-authored a paper with Susskind using the latter method. ;-) Now, I think that many viXra-style authors wouldn’t be willing to do such a thing because their personal fame etc. is more important for them than the actual happiness about the findings in physics – which is too bad. And by the way, you know, I am a capitalism-oriented person and I do think that it’s a flawed idea for unpaid people to do some hard work. (Of course that on the other hand, once I complete a theory of everything, I won’t be hiding it forever.) There’s a lot of hard work that is not necessarily revolutionary that I could do but it’s just natural if it is done by the official professionals. What I want to say is that I have nothing to do with the people who are dreaming about publishing a single paper in a journal, or something like that, and who are annoying physicists with their notes etc. I still belong vastly to the opposite category of those who are being flooded by such correspondence from the true outsiders – and I am realistic enough to know that not every idea that makes me excited for minutes deserves to appear in a mailbox of a famous physicist! I’ve never had problems with getting a paper published and I got tired of this formal process, too. One sometimes works real hard on a paper and the reactions are often next-to-non-existent and I found it kind of frustrating, especially if you see hundreds of completely unintelligent, ignorant, uncreative, unproductive, and uneducated aggressive hacks of the Woit type who will even *criticize* you for making something that they could never do in their life, namely a genuine contribution to science. This is of course related to the unemotional silent work in ivory towers that many people consider the necessary format of doing science.

One more important topic you mentioned – important contributions away from the cutting edge. Well, I don’t quite see what they could mean. My thinking about the progress in physics *is* all about cutting edges and front lines – or, using David Gross’ words, the boundary separating the topological ball of our knowledge from the exterior region of our ignorance. This is not how I think about the knowledge of mathematics which is fragmented – the known things about maths have a very complicated topology – but I just do think that there is a cutting edge in physics that almost smoothly finds its way around all subdisciplines of physics. In every “class” of questions about physics, there is a “typical question” that is substantially uncertain and this is the highest-chance place to make progress. Now, you may succeed in showing that some seemingly “very well-known thing” deeply inside the “known territory” actually has a different answer than everyone thought. You will need strong arguments and your new picture will have to replace all the successes of the existing theories whose validity you want to deny. But if you manage to do so, everyone should be able to understand you and this will be a real revolution, so I don’t see any problem here. On the other hand, if your arguably novel research is deeply in the “unknown territory”, then it may mean one of two things: your discoveries are actually invalid because you’re swimming in the middle of the ocean where no one can swim for too long and your idea that you have solved something is just an illusion of excessive self-confidence: you’re just detached from the reality and ignorant about the real knowledge of science about the related matters – which is too bad. Or it can mean that you made genuine insights that put you well ahead of everyone else. Obviously, in the first case, your work is bogus. In the second case, it is always possible – and one could say that it is your duty – to present everything that is needed so that others can follow you and swim to the place very far from the beaches where you managed to get. This is the very purpose of writing papers for other people, isn’t it? Once you do it, then your paper becomes totally analogous to the “unproblematic papers about freshly hot topics” that you have described in the context of my insights on Matrix theory. I don’t see any problem.

I even think that if you make a substantial finding about e.g. Matrix theory today, which would of course have to go well beyond the typical followup papers about the topic from the late 1990s, it will not be just me who will be thrilled. People who have known enough about it will be intrigued and many of them will revisit the topic. Many new researchers who are choosing what they really like will join, too. Such things are not happening because no one is presenting any major discoveries about these “no longer [currently] hot topics”, not because there is a conspiracy. Meanwhile, lots of papers are being written about less profound topics – and about Erik-Verlinde-like crackpot ideas as well – simply because people want to do *something* – and need to do something for existential reasons – and these other topics offer a lot of potentials to write new, usually shallow papers “automatically”.

But if you meant some topics that are completely detached from all “front lines” in the physicists’ battle for a better understanding of the Universe, well, I don’t really believe that there are any insights of this sort. Physics is ultimately about explanations of the real world and phenomena in it and for each class of phenomena, there exists some current state of knowledge that may be more advanced or less advanced but it defines what people know. So whatever you find about some phenomena will either be a dramatic revision of the existing theories, and will be therefore comprehensible and important for the experts, or it will be an “evolutionary step” that builds on the previous insights. I just fail to see how an important insight could exist “independently” of the existing cutting-edge research. The only thing that could happen is that an outsider isn’t familiar with the knowledge of the people but he still manages to find something new and important. However, in that case, he can’t really know that it’s new. So he should spend some time about what other physicists actually think, and then I reduce it to the previous scenarios.

Lubos, I would not doubt for a moment that you could find an endorser now if you required one, even if you were submitting to “Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics” :)

Your comments about fundamental physics being derailed by the pressure to produce phenomenological results seems very astute. I don’t doubt that there is a lot of truth in it. The pressure from funding bodies to connect results directly to the real world has a big effect. There is still some fundamental research taking place but it may need a bigger scale effort with explicit funding to make the breakthrough.

Apart from that, I think the reason that matrix theory cannot progress is that it uses the idea that the matrices represent the coordinates. This reflects the sigma model formulations where the points in target space are functions on the string worldsheet. Matrix models might be more flexible if they were turned inside out so that matrices (or higher rank tensors) represent string field variables as if they are functions on spacetime, but space-time has to still be emergent. This would be related more directly to a string field theory approach.

I too have serious doubts about the course being taken by entropic gravity. Although the idea of gravity from entropy is itself a nice idea, it is odd that this has turned into an explanation for the cosmological constant. In fact Verlinde builds on the fact that 75% of the energy in the universe is dark energy and compares this to a one sigma effect. As every cosmologist knows the energy density is constant while the density of matter decreases as the universe expands. The 75% figure is only correct at the current epoch. It was much less in the early universe and will be much more as the universe expands. This means his interpretation is nonsense, yet nobody asks the question, very odd.

Dear Simplicity, thanks to Norway which I visited in 1992, Fjords, dancing girls in Oslo – with ABBA music, and so on. Nice.

Hi Phil, your comments about my links to endorsers surely look rosier than they are. My point is that it’s not that hard in general, not that it’s easy for me. If I were to submit a paper on the climate to the peer-reviewed journal, I would instantly give it up. It would be too much effort and the quality wouldn’t be what decides at the end, anyway. But it’s questionable how big a part of the genuine and impartial analyses of the data occur in the professional journals.

The pressure to connect research with accessible “phenomena” has been particularly illogical because there haven’t been any new phenomena in particle physics observed for more than a decade and even the previous ones were modest. It’s just a wrong focus. When experiments etc. were hard, it would be much better an investment to focus on formal theory. Now when the LHC is starting to produce the data, it has already killed 99 percent of the phenomenological work in the recent decade or so. None of the things based on a wishful thinking that something is observable and behind the corner has been right. There is nothing behind the corner. Progress can only be made if one looks at more universal and more ambitious questions, without making assumptions that amount to wishful thinking. I hope that the LHC will soon prove me wrong but it was just silly to investigate 5,000 shallow models even though it was clear that at least 4,999 of them had to be wrong.

My feeling is that there could be a dictionary between a string field theory and matrix string theory that is “exact” in some sense but I don’t know what it exactly means because string field theory is only known perturbatively in g while matrix string theory is exact. Your comment about the link is brave and I am afraid that you would have to supply some details and evidence for me – and not only me – to see any sense in your speculation. At any rate, I don’t understand why would you call it a problem. BTW Matrix theory has still enjoyed about the same research activity as string field theory.

Jesus, using the entropic gravity to explain the C.C. is probably too much of a good thing for me to read. “Research” based on mixing these random ultraambitious topics is clearly driven just by desire to impress, not real results. Gravity is not entropic – objects without event horizons don’t carry any entropy proportional to 1/G, regardless of their gravitational potential. Entropic origin of gravity between normal objects would break interference patterns and reversibility of gravity. It’s just wrong. The C.C. has nothing to do with it even if gravity were entropic.

Gravity is linked to entropy but this A/4G entropy only occurs if there are event horizons – A is the total area of event horizons. It includes black hole horizons and more speculatively, it may include cosmic horizons, but no horizons mean no gravitational entropy.

There is plenty of evidence that not all arXiv postings, despite being endorsed, are either going to make a difference or lead to a true paradigm shift. For example, papers on Horava-Lifshitz gravity, large extra dimensions, KK instantons, Randall-Sundrum scenario, E8 unification, Technicolor, Deformed Special Relativity, Entropic Gravity may likely fail to stand in the long run. Same goes for many viXra contributions.
Endorsing a paper before posting in the public domain (or the amount of attraction that paper generates from peers) is certainly not a guarantee for its success.

quoting Dr Gibbs
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Sometimes it is less immediately obvious that a new idea is going to be of value. It is not so sure that an endorser would be available if it came from someone not yet in a research position, but it is important that the work should be made available without delay. It also needs to be done in a way that protects the authors priority,.i.e not on a personal web page or by sending it privately to other physicists.
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this is the reason why i am on viXra..and i know i am not alone here
i was an arXiv scientist….. see for example gr-qc/0603106..published in peer review
but i abandoned 5 dimensional theories in favor of something more interesting:
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the Warp Drive….
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Warp Drive do not requires 10 times the mass of the Universe to be generated(see gr-qc/9702026) but instead it can be generated with 94 tons of the so-called exotic matter..(vXra:1103.0087) but i know i am sailing against the tide
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while this blog is not intented to discuss Warp Drives .or other topics of physics it is very interesting specially the column “Crackpots That Were Right”-this blog illustrates how difficult can be the pathway of a guy sailing against the tide
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.when i abandoned 5 dimensional theories i lost arXiv i lost academic support i lost friends,i lost everything……but i dont care any longer…..because i know i am right. with 94 tons of exotic matter .i decided to make science for passion not to fulllfill the curriculum of an academic institution
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viXra is doing is job in an excellent manner..
like Dr Gibbs says ” protects the author priority”

While peer-reviews are necessary tools for science journals, endorsments may easily become too restrictive when posting in the public domain. In particular, cutting-edge research cannot be arbitrarily censored on the basis of existing knowledge. Both arXiv or viXra are repositories meant to store information in an unbiased way. This ought to be obvious to all, yet many do not see it this way.

There are those who ask, “When will you be satisfied?” We cannot be satisfied as long as a scientist outside the establishment cannot get his paper published in a peer-reviewed journal and a scientist in the establishment believes he has nothing for which to write. We can never be satisfied as long as mankind is short-changed by hypocrisy and repression in the establishments of Science. We can never be satisfied, as long as our intellectual properties, cultivated and harvested with sweat, cannot gain entries into the journals and electronic archives of Science guarded by the establishments. We can never be satisfied as long as young generations of men and women are stripped of their inquiring minds and robbed of their intellectual freedom by signs stating “Establishment Science Only.” No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until freedom and equality roll down like waters and opportunity to be heard like a mighty stream.

Let us remind ourselves the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of silence or to take the tranquilizing drug of innocence. Now is the time to make real progress in Science. As we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

We are not unmindful that some among us have suffered great trials and tribulations. Some among us are still in the suffocating environment of suppression. Some among us have just left from areas where their quest for truth left them battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of establishment tactics. Some among us have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. [IMMLK]

I have no idea what are you speaking about. But very poetic. Try rhyming it.

Why exactly do you want to publish in arXiv? You can publish here. Seriously, why do you want to publish in existing peer-review journals? You could create your own journals. Can you force a private journal (a peer-reviewed journal) to publish what you want?

I believe what you want is not so poetic. You want to publish in existing peer-reviewed journals and arXiv because they’ve already got a reputation and a big audience. But maybe they’ve got these because of their strategy. You can’t separate the results from the strategy. If you don’t like someone’s journal, provide an alternative. It may be less successful. I don’t believe this actitude to be honest.

You could always create your own journals and repositories. They would not have the same initial audience and reputation. They can be successful or a failure, but at least it’s honest. This is what Mr. Gibbs is doing with viXra.

The problem is scientist have no much time to judge papers meticulously, so they base their judgments on the reputation of the publishers, authors and institutions. That’s one big problem.

So Mr. Gibbs here helps with the problem: he created a repository for works not to be lost. He understands the problem, but it can be helped: scientists are not going to have more time, so they will continue to make fast judgments that work in most cases, at the cost of ignoring some good ideas and promote a few bad ideas. This ideas can be preserved here.

But other people here seems to go beyond that. They demand existing journals to publish their work. So I believe they’re accepting the bad system. I think all they want is to take advantage of the bad system. That way, your papers would benefit from the reputation of the journals, which you’re criticizing.

To sum up: you can criticize existing journals. You can provide alternatives. But I believe you’re focusing the problem wrongly: you can not force people to spend their time with your works. All you can do it to provide alternatives, and advertise them honestly.

By the way, I would advise you, in a World with seven million persons, don’t be so offended for a publication to ignore your ideas. Simply develop a little more its consequences. If they’re interesting, the idea would ultimately spread. I know it’s difficult to work in a potentially interesting idea. But get real: seven hundred people, all with their own interesting ideas. The responsibility to make the idea and its implications interesting is yours. It’s always been this way. So please, stop crying about people not be superinterested in your ideas. While, you can publish their development here :)

quoting J
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The problem is scientist have no much time to judge papers meticulously, so they base their judgments on the reputation of the publishers, authors and institutions. That’s one big problem.

So Mr. Gibbs here helps with the problem: he created a repository for works not to be lost. He understands the problem, but it can be helped: scientists are not going to have more time, so they will continue to make fast judgments that work in most cases, at the cost of ignoring some good ideas and promote a few bad ideas. This ideas can be preserved here
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this is the reason why viXra is so important…look i got luck with HAL INSMI and CNRS but these are connected to arXiv (the French mirror of arXiv) so i was expecting a rejection like i had from arXiv….fortunately one moderator thinks different than the other

i will continue of course to use viXra….because i will never be sure that a moderator awakes in “good mood” when analyzing a submission